Mimsy Were the Borogoves

This weekend I enabled the new comments system for all of Mimsy. Over the next several days you’ll see the JSKit/Echo code disappearing in favor of the new local code. The code is very light: only a tiny, unnecessary JavaScript snippet and a handful of cookies. Both JavaScript and cookies are optional.

I’ve been using it for several months on the much-lower-traffic The Biblyon Broadsheet. As I wrote there, it’s a simple system: no logins. If you have cookies turned on it will remember your most recent name, URL, location, and email (all of which, except for name, are optional). See The Ten Commandments for the rules. This much simpler system is based on my experience using something similar at the Ace of Spades HQ.

Emails are private; they’re so that I can contact you if I decide I need to. But you can leave it blank if you don’t want me to be able to. This is better than JSKit/Echo, where the only way to contact you that I could find was to leave another comment on my blog.¹

The only somewhat unique requirement is that you take some time between writing and posting to preview. It will tell you how many seconds to wait before posting, and if you have JavaScript turned on it will count them down for you.

I have been planning on switching to a custom comments system ever since I started using JSKit; it was always a temporary solution. I don’t like using web tracking services, which is what JSKit/Echo really is: it’s a way for Echo to track people’s movements across different sites. That’s why you don’t currently see Google Analytics on my pages either: because the code is loaded from Google’s/Echo’s servers, Google (in the case of analytics) and Echo (in the case of comments) can track your movement across any page that uses that code. I’m just enough of a privacy nut that that bothers me.

Because I have access to the database, I’ve got it set to tentatively approve new posts rather than wait for moderation as I did with JSKit. If something looks like spam, or if the system sees something else odd going on (for example, multiple posts from the same IP over a short period of time) it can tentatively disapprove new posts. In each case, I have a simple database backend (in Django) to give me an overview and confirm or revoke the decisions made by the automated system.

My hope is that this will make it easier for me, because I’ll be able to detect the most egregious spammers. Knock on wood, much of that hasn’t been necessary during the test run on The Biblyon Broadsheet, I suspect because the built-in delay confuses most (but not all) comment spammers.

What lies beyond the far craters, as the Earth rises in the lunar dawn?

Presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich wants NASA to offer prizes to encourage private industry to put men back on the moon. It’s not a bad idea except insofar as it’s likely to be counterproductive: getting to the moon is expensive; anyone who wants the prize will be in the race for the price, and not for the moon. They’ll do the minimum necessary to meet the rules necessary to win, and that is not likely to be in the spirit of the competition.

Prizes will only encourage private development up to and including the worth of the prize. If the money is set to be, say, $10,000,000, then no solutions costing more than ten million will be seriously looked at.

And then once they win the prize, they’re done. What is the incentive for them to go further? This is the kind of half-step that I’d expect from a politician. Businesses often offer prizes, but they do so to solve a particular problem, not a general one. They want assurances that when someone wins the prize the results of that win are useful and the effort was a serious effort at solving a problem that allows the business or consortium to move to a next step.

If we want businesses to start taking lunar colonies or lunar exploration seriously, we need to be just as serious when it comes to the rewards. If our goal is to find out what’s on the moon, and to find out how the moon’s resources can improve our life here on Earth, the best way to encourage lunar exploration is by updating homesteading to the space age: if you can get there, and land there, and stay there, you own it. You own your 160 acres or 320 acres or whatever on the moon, and you have rights to all minerals and other resources on or under your little section of the moon.

Under lunar homesteading, the resources used to get to the moon will match the benefits to be derived from getting there. If there are great rewards to be gained by establishing bases on the moon, businesses will make sure they get there.

It’s important to tie the incentive to ownership because we don’t really know what the worth is of the resources on the moon. A prize doesn’t provide any incentive to find out. Ownership does. Even if nobody goes to the moon we’ll still see innovations in finding out what resources the moon holds. That alone will be worth a lot in unrelated industries: remote sensing technologies will be developed to find out what’s on the moon before sending any people or equipment there.

Here are some sample photos taken from the Olympus Pen E-P2. Click on any image to embiggen; I take the photos at 4032x3024, but here I’ve dropped them down to 2688x2016 to keep the file sizes under a megabyte at high quality.

These two photos were both taken with the 17mm lens. The breakfast photo was from about a foot away; the 17mm lens can theoretically take photos from .67 feet. The line of palms was taken from a moving car (by a passenger!) at about 35-45 miles per hour on the Pacific Coast Highway.

The next four photos were taken with the 14-150mm lens. The aloe plant was about ten feet away, as was the tree.

Here’s an example of the difference between minimum and maximum zoom. I went for a bit of a walk to find a clear view of Mission Valley; this is overlooking Hotel Circle just above the back road to the UCSD hospital.

The Olympus Pen, using the 17mm lens, just about fits in the palm of my hand.

About a year and a half ago, I replaced my Sony DCR PC-330 with an Olympus Pen E-P2. The Sony was (and still is) a great video recorder, but it’s outdated as a stills camera¹; further, while compact, the PC-330 was just a bit too big for me to carry around regularly.

I chose the Pen because it was getting great reviews and I love the form factor. From the front it looks like a classic camera. I chose the kit with the 17mm pancake lens because that really makes for a small footprint. I can carry this camera in my pocket—barely, but I can and have done it. Also, I knew that when I got a zoom lens I would want a bit more than 14-42 lens that comes with the zoom kit version. I considered just getting a naked kit without any lens, and maybe getting the 25mm lens, but the kits come with savings, and the 17mm lens also got good reviews—it was something people gladly bought on its own. It’s supposed to be similar to what you get on a 35mm camera.

The Pen is a great quick-use camera. Most of the time I leave it on AUTO and let it detect where the focus is, how much exposure is needed, and everything else. When I need to manually focus, it zooms in on whatever the camera is pointed at, to make it easier to manually focus.

For all that it’s easy to use, this is not a buy, point, and shoot. There is no digital zoom. If you want to digitally zoom an image, you’ll do so afterwards in your image editor. The only zoom you have on the camera is from the lenses you buy for it.

There is no built-in flash. I recently purchased the FL-14 flash attachment because I’ve been doing more indoor shooting in poor lighting recently (a writers conference, a fantasy convention, and a bloggers conference). I haven’t needed a flash that much, however—the camera takes decent photos even in a bar’s stage lighting. It won’t take decent photos looking away from the stage, however—that’s too dark.

I’m only twenty-five pages into this book, and I’m already hooked. This is a great book about the early days of the microcomputer industry, the days when the TRS-80 was the only fully off-the-shelf non-kit computer, when Wayne Green was one of the biggest magazine publishers in the United States, and when having a computer meant having friends over to play around at programming.

I’m going to write a review of this book later. But I can already guarantee it’s going to be a positive one.

It’s filled with photos and ads from the time, and great stories. If you’re looking for a little microcomputer history as we move into 2012, I recommend it. If you actually used a TRS-80, you’re going to love it.

After searching for an audio recording app that would save in MP3 format and do email, I kept a few of the apps that didn’t do what I wanted but that showed promise. One of them was Pocket Wavepad HD. NCH Software has a feedback page, and I think I made two suggestions, as I recall: allow saving in mp3, and use the internal filename as the e-mailed filename.¹

I just looked at Wavepad again last night; it seems to have everything I want now, plus some: besides recording, as SmartRecorder and VR+ do, it also allows editing, and it allows recording in high quality and then saving a copy in a lower-quality mp3. When I email the mp3 to myself, it has the same filename I saved it as in the app. Judging from the changelog, mp3 support was added in version 4.56 last month, probably right after I downloaded it the first time.

Controlling the format and compression rate is much easier on Wavepad than on SmartRecorder. SmartRecorder does have at least one benefit over Wavepad: Wavepad won’t record in the background, but SmartRecorder will. That would make it useful for recording while looking at other apps. It’s not something I’ve used yet, however.

Another new feature, judging from the changelog, is that I can record high quality audio, and then have Wavepad automatically encode it to mp3 when I create an email.

It’s made for the iPad² , and it uses the built-in Mail app, which means I can save drafts and they’ll be in the Mail app’s drafts folder. (But see later for a bug in this functionality.)

The editing feature is barebones, but very useful for what I’d be using it for as a blogging app. It even lets you edit multiple recordings at one time, and copy and paste between them.

It does have some effects. Most of them are useful effects: silencing a selection, noise reduction, amplification, normalization, etc. But there’s also echo and reverse, too, which is what I’m showing off here.

It’s very rare that I get really excited by software. The first time was probably for Ashton-Tate’s FullWrite, and that turned out to be a bust—it could create amazing one-page documents, but exceed about ten pages and the Macintosh slowed to a crawl. Hit fifty or sixty pages and you could go out to eat in the time it took to redraw the screen.

Maybe ClarisWorks. Definitely iTunes. Even though it was a reskinned third-party product, it simplified the skin enough that I wasn’t asking “what is this software for?” and used it to listen to music again.

I’ve been using Nisus Writer Pro 2.0 since last year. I started using Nisus at 1.0. If you’ve been paying attention to the Hacks and gaming tools section of my blog, you’ve seen the occasional Nisus script. But I didn’t buy Nisus 1.x because I could program it; I bought it because it made writing easier. It’s rare that its feature set gets in the way of writing as happens in other word processors (*cough* Microsoft Word *cough*). Getting to styles are a single click and they’re set up the same way as formatting the actual text: using styles to format text is just as easy as formatting the text directly, which means I’m no longer tempted to apply formatting to text outside of styles, only to rue it later when I need to change formatting throughout the document.

If you’ve followed my occasional rant about word processors, you’ll know that the one thing that kept me from switching away from Word for a long time was it’s support for full-document outlines, where the document is the outline and the outline is the document. Nisus Writer Pro got “the document is the outline” in 1.0, and it got “the outline is the document” in 1.2—and it’s much easier to use than my copy of Word’s modal version¹. The outline appears as a navigation column to the left of the document window.

I’ve been trying to set up an easy way of liveblogging—blogging on the road, from a conference or convention, or just when I see something I want to photograph and blog about. The kicker is that I wanted to be able to write the post whether I’m online or offline.

When I sat down to think about the best way of handling it was to use email. While it’s possible to write some complicated HTML5 application, all I really want is to send some text and photos to my blog and have them post. Email will do this: I can write it whenever I want, and as soon as the iPad gets onto a network, it will send the mail(s).

Writing the software for handling incoming photos has been relatively easy: the iPad comes with a built in camera app that can easily email one or more photos using the standard e-mail software on the iPad, so all I had to do was grab the emails as they came in.

While I’m not a huge fan of audio podcasting—I prefer reading—I thought it ought to be easy to do the same for recorded audio. Technically, it’s just as easy to grab audio from an email as it is to grab photos, and the iPad can record audio. As long as it comes in a standard, small format like mp3, it should be a snap.

Unfortunately, there’s no built-in app for that. There’s no built-in app for any audio recording, and if there was it probably wouldn’t handle mp3. GarageBand is great for making mp3 podcasts on the Mac, but the iPad GarageBand doesn’t support mp3. It only supports AAC.

I looked for hours on the web and directly on the iTunes app store, and I found nothing that could handle those three requirements: mp3, email, using the iPad’s built-in email app. The two closest were VR+ and Smart Recorder.

Both VR+ and Smart Recorder come in “Lite” free versions, so if you feel like you need them, I recommend trying the free one first.

VR+ Voice for Twitter/Facebook/Blogger/MySpace

Initially, despite its shortcomings, I leaned toward VR+ from SHAPE Services. It emails the files as mp3 files. Unfortunately, it’s also not only not ready for the iPad yet, it doesn’t use the built-in email app. I thought I could live without those features, but the combination meant it was a real pain to send a simple email.